


Meltwater

by apollos



Series: The Waves Against the Rock [4]
Category: South Park
Genre: In Media Res, M/M, Mental Illness, No Ending, Sad, Unhappy Ending, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 14:02:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9749192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: Stan and Kyle move back home. It snows.Should have known better.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is 100% a cope fic but i never claimed this series to be anything but
> 
> this probably won't make a lot of sense but it sets up some stuff in the last installment, hence the in media res tag. vague things are left vague on purpose.

_be my rest, be my fantasy_

no, i’m not a go-getter  
the demon had a spell on me  
my black shroud  
captain of my feelings  
the only thing i wanna believe

[...]

i should have known better  
nothing can be changed  
the past is still the past  
the bridge to nowhere

sufjan stevens, "should have known better"

They are twenty-five and have just moved back to Stan's house from Arizona. Stan misses the heat. A blizzard just ripped through South Park, dumping three feet of snow on the ground over the past four days or so, shutting Stan and his family inside his house like the post-apocalyptic films Kyle's so obsessed with. "Do you think we'd make it?" Kyle's always asking him about the film they've just watched; "If a nuclear bomb hit; if a geomagnetic event occurred; if global warming melted everything away?"

"Sure," Stan lies.

Stan's been doing a lot of lying. A lot of dodging questions and shifting eyes. A lot of laying on the couch with Kyle, or laying in bed, holding him close.

Today is Valentine's Day. Stan loves Valentine's Day. It's three in the afternoon, and Kyle has not left the teenaged double bed with the vaguely stained mattress underneath flannel sheets in Stan's room all day. Stan stomps his feet on the scratchy _WELCOME HOME_ mat as he walks in the door, unlaces his boots and puts them in the bin. He sees his mother's, dwarfed by his own; his father is at work and so far, Kyle has not found reason to venture out, his boots sitting in Stan's room, untouched by snow and salt.

Stan puts the bouquet down on the coffee table as he unzips his coat. It's dry. It hasn't been snowing, just cold in a mindless way. He throws it on the couch, knowing his mother will hang it up later, feeling guilty. But there are more important matters at hand, literally, as he picks up the bouquet.

He tries to walk as quietly up the stairs as possible. He's gained weight since he was home last, holding a pouch of fat at his waistline. He worked out a lot in Arizona, going for runs out in the dirt and the rocks, but he hasn't done shit since he's moved back.

Kyle is asleep in bed, as Stan has predicted. The room is dark. Stan turns on the bedside lamp with his free hand, trying to keep the bouquet from making any plastic crumpling sounds and giving him away. He feels like he's diffusing a bomb. Kyle wakes up anyway and rolls over, looking at Stan with swollen eyes.

"Roses?" Kyle says after a beat. The lamplight is warm on his face.

"Yeah," Stan says. He's still holding them, and Kyle is not reaching out to take them. "For you."

"Obviously," Kyle says. Meanly. Then: "Thanks."

"Yeah," Stan says again. "I'm going to go down and put them in some water."

He does that. He had not bothered to get a card, or write anything on the one provided by the florist and attached to the bouquet. When his mother appears from her bedroom, having been on the phone, he tells her that they're for her. While she's admiring them, he hangs up his coat.

* * *

Stan knows Kyle well enough after two decades to know that the breakdown is imminent. He braces as he goes through the rest of the evening. He goes to the grocery store to buy some stuff so his mom can bake his dad a chocolate cake and then he helps her make it, measuring and mixing and icing the top, feeling like a little kid. Like he should have a handmade card, _Happy Valentine's Day Daddy_ on the front, a shitty drawing on the inside. But he doesn't, because he's twenty-five, a man.

Sharon doesn't ask him what he and Kyle are doing for Valentine's Day. Later, though, right before Randy returns, Stan pulls her into the garage.

"I don't know what to do," Stan says. "I don't know what will make him happy."

"Oh, Stan," his mother says, putting a hand on his arm. "Give it time."

"We've been here since Christmas, Mom." The exact date: December 3rd. They arrived at Stan's house in the early morning. Kyle's parents were gone, in Minnesota, watching one of Ike's games.

"Well, you could have him committed."

"He's not a danger to himself or others," Stan recites, until he remembers to say, "And I wouldn't do that to him."

"I don't know what to tell you. I never—I don't know," Sharon says. She sighs. "I didn't have these problems with you and your sister."

"When I was younger—"

"You got help, and it went away." It's true. Stan's grown out of his depression. Doesn't even have to take pills for it anymore. He saw a therapist every month in Arizona to manage his school stress, and he exercised, and that was it.

"Maybe it's just the day," Stan say.

And indeed, when he crawls into bed that night—too late—Kyle starts in. His complaints: he feels unlovable and unloved. This day is torture. Everybody is so happy, and he's not, and he's wasting away in bed and he's locked himself inside this room and he's swallowed the key and his only option is to wade through his own shit to retrieve it.

"I love you," Stan says. This fact should be as plain as day. Who the fuck else would he put himself through this for? His mom, maybe. Probably. And it's the highest compliment for a man to love somebody even more than his mother.

"You haven't kissed me in eleven days."

Eleven days. Not nearly two weeks. Stan can't remember the last time he's kissed Kyle, is surprised it's been so recent. They've not had sex, or brought each other off, since they've moved back, though.

The proper thing to do would be to kiss Kyle. Stan looks at his lips. They're chapped, and sort of bleeding in spots. Stan does not kiss Kyle.

* * *

February slogs on. Snow melts, forms ice and slush, gets salted, and then it snows more, and then there's another blizzard. Still Kyle's boots sit in Stan's room.

He might as well get a job, so Stan signs up with the city. They're always thirsty for workers in these frozen non-months. Stan's cohorts are the poorest of South Park: Kenny and Kevin McCormick.

"The prodigal son," Kenny calls him before a shift. It's three in the morning. Stan is not tired; he's grown accustomed to these hours, knowing Kyle's awake at home, moving through some series on Netflix or something.

"Ha," Stan says.

"We never thought we were gonna see you again, man," Kenny says, and Stan thinks, _we?_ As far as he knows the only other person Kenny could be referring to is Cartman, but Stan hasn't spoken to Cartman in five years. Maybe Wendy? But Wendy's at graduate school at Yale. Does Kenny talk to anybody else? Craig's gang? They're dispersed, too: Clyde moved after his father remarried, Craig and Tweek are living in Costa Rica (Stan stalks their Instagrams in secret) and Token's doing med school at John Hopkins. Where the fuck even is everybody? Where have they gone? Why has Stan come back? Why does this whole fucking place sit suspended in time, waiting for some disaster both unforeseen and predicted? And who the fuck is _we_? But Stan doesn't ask. Besides, Stan's been in touch with Kenny since he's gotten back. Has seen him at the grocery store a few times. Treated him to lunch.

Instead, Stan says, "Cold one out there today."

"It's cold every day, dipshit," Kevin says, lurking in a corner and drinking a beer. They're not supposed to drink, obviously. Stan doesn't rat him out.

"Yeah," Stan says.

The work at the city is good. Fulfilling. Stan shovels snow and runs a snow blower and, if needed, drives down the streets, dumping salt from the back of a truck. He feels tired at the end of the day, properly physically tired. The pay and the benefits are shit, but Stan's not working for those reasons.

Back in Arizona, Kyle had worked in human resources for a management company. It was a nice job, a good job, a job with a future. He wore smart clothes to work, a skinny tie around his high collar that drove Stan wild. That made him want to mark his skin. And he did, and it was good, and then one day Kyle woke him up in the middle of the night with sobs that sounded like nothing Stan has ever heard before—animal. Like a wounded animal with wounded children. Stan's had a lot of time to classify these sobs. They live inside of him, never to be let out.

* * *

"Come on. Come out. Let's go draw a dick in the snow. Like when we were kids."

Kyle looks at him like he's the crazy one here. Stan admonishes himself for that thought.

And then Stan goes out in the backyard, which has about six inches of snow, and sketches a fucking giant cock that takes up the entire yard. He spends all day doing this, with veins and shading and everything, going up to the second story to check on his progress and adjust as needed. He sweats, though he's not sure why, because it's in the single digits and the work isn't physically taxing.

"I drew a dick in the snow for you," Stan says to Kyle when the sun is setting and he's finished. Kyle's standing at the window. Stan has felt his eyes on him all evening.

"How romantic."

It's been over a month (it's been thirty-five days) since they've kissed.

* * *

Stan expects an ending, and in one way he gets one. When winter crumbles into spring he quits his job at the city, aware of the stigma to chase him into backbreaking summer work. He's lost the weight, and he's muscled up, though. He quits his job, but he doesn't know where to go next.

Ike comes back after his team fails in the first round of the Stanley Cup run, and though he's good-natured Stan knows he's a little disappointed, a little mad. He spends hours up in Stan's room with Kyle, Stan waiting in the living room, trying to watch something on television and unable to concentrate. He feels like the husband of a weak woman who's just given birth in the 1800s, but there's no fucking baby.

Ike finally comes down, the good-naturedness melted off his face, the frozen slush of exhaustion left in its place. "I can't do anything," he says, and Stan thinks, crazily: my wife and my baby are dead.


End file.
